As Instagram advertising was introduced by its parent company, Facebook, about half a year ago, many companies jumped onto the bandwagon of Instagram marketing. However, to be good in Instagram marketing, you have to play a totally different ball game from Facebook marketing.

Here are some tips to succeed in your brand’s Instagram marketing campaign!

#1 What’s The Theme of Your Brand?

Credits: quickmeme.com

Especially if you are pretty new in Instagram with less amount of followers, it is important to decide on what are the theme you want for your brand. That is how you want others to recognise your brand for? Nowadays, attention level on social media is getting little and little by day as we have too much information and too many nice pictures to look at. Therefore, it is important to let consumers know what your brand represents in a snap.

Do not aim to be a jack of all trades where you show all kinds of photos whether they are related or not related to your targeted consumers. Show only the photos to your targeted consumers such that they will respond and buy your products and services eventually.

#2 Good Picture Matters

Credits: Reddit User – ChefOlsen

In the age of the Instagrammers, your business will only survive if you have nice looking pictures! Invest in quality cameras or engage the professionals to take nice photos of your products and services. Such investment will definitely pays off in the long run. For small business and startups without high budget to engage professionals to do the work, invest in yourself and learn to take nice photos whether it is portrait, landscape, selfies or wefies!

#3 Hashtag It!

Credits: buzzfeed.com

You must know these two types of hashtags. First is the brand derived hashtag. This may not have many people search for it but it is highly relevant to your brand. This is because the brand derived hashtag gives your brand an identity in the infinite hashtag space on Instagram. The other hashtag you need to know will be the popular search tags that your targeted consumers as well as your competitors will be using on a constant basis. By following the top two tips above (having a brand theme and post good pictures), the probability of your pictures to get on the Top (popular) post section of the popular tags will be very high. Thereby, driving more potential consumers attention to your pictures and your Instagram account.

#4 Advertise on Instagram

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Instagram advertising is a totally different ballgame from Facebook advertising. Your sponsored ad will appear in the Instagram home feed of the accounts (demographics) that you targeted. Unlike Facebook, you can’t advertise for people to become your Instagram followers. Therefore, to make full use of your Instagram ads, you have to have a strong call to action in your content. What you want them to do? To follow you or sign up in your website? Indicate clearly in your ad content. The other thing is make use of brand derived hashtags in your ads. This will help consumers to understand more about your brand by looking at more pictures from your brand derived hashtags. Personally, I prefer the Instagram advertising model to Facebook advertising model though they belonged to the same company. This is because, it will prevent the current problem face which is the saturation of advertisers sharing the same pie of consumers in the longer run.

#5 Grow Quality Followers

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The key success factor on Instagram is definitely the total number of followers your brand have. However, the important factor of all, is the quality of the followers. Ask yourself are they targeted consumers? Do the followers consistently liked your photos? Quality followers will lead to high sales conversion on Instagram. It will explain why two similar brands with the same amount of followers, have different variation in the engagement rate. For example Brand A and Brand B have 5000 followers on Instagram. However, whenever Brand A post a picture on Instagram, only less than 100 followers will like the picture. But when Brand B post a picture, there is more than 200 likes for that. This clearly shows that Brand A does not have quality followers or targeted consumers compared to Brand B. Therefore Brand A needs to revise its Instagram marketing strategy.

#6 Locate It!

Make good use of the location tags. Be everywhere you want to be or where your targeted consumers are. This easy tip goes well for FMCG products for example a mineral water brand. Place your product in different parts of the world and “instagram locate” it! (I guessed that’s the term for it. Haha!) Or you can also encourage your fans to post a picture of them with your product and tag their location wherever they are. This will somehow plant many “mini location flags” of your brand on the Instagrammy world. Conquer the world!

#7 Like Your Fan’s Updates

Credits: Pinterest User – John Parker

Randomly check out the latest updates of your Instagram followers. We are talking about social media where people and people interact or brand to people interact. Therefore, a brand has to be personified. Your instagram followers may be celebrating their birthdays, having a new born in the family, a new haircut, getting married or reach a milestone in their lives. Celebrate with them. Double click to like the updates if you find them meaningful. For that simple like, your fans will definitely appreciate it and love your brand for life.

And there you have, the 7 tips of Instagram Marketing! Happy Instagramming!